Dr. Robinson, what's behind this rally we're seeing in prices? Is it supply or demand?

Well, first of all, I think it's mostly a supply side influence as opposed to strong demand.

We've had export sales reports in the last few weeks that have been OK, but they haven't been spectacular and they wouldn't justify a great big price rally from the demand side.

And I haven't heard really anything encouraging in general that encouraging about the general economy or retail apparel sales or anything like that.

So I think what we're dealing with is concern for a short supply because of the searing hot weather that we've all been experiencing in the month

What are you seeing there?

Well, I haven't checked with the merchants, but I imagine they'd be wanting or have been securing some commitments from producers.

So the first opportunity is, is there a merchant out there offering a decent cash price off of the December futures at, you know, 93, wherever it is? Another marketing thought is that at this unusually high price, there's really nothing, there's no farm program mechanism that'll protect this particular price, if that makes sense.

in Smith's time, at least in anything that was published that it would have made any sense to anybody, right? So for this strong claim to be true, it had to be a phrase that was in currency and being used in the language and be not just used in the language, but being

referred to

But yeah, thank you.

I can do an extremely short version of this paper.

But first let me say thank you as well to Eric for putting this panel together.

This is really great fun.

It's about 15 years ago that we would have been taking some classes together.

And I think maybe 20 years ago that I first came across Jordan when I was an undergraduate going to some act and stuff.

I wanna give credit where credit-

Yeah.

But equally, you, you couldn't take a hardened automation engineer and sit them down at an SAP development environment and say, "Go and code ABAP," or whatever the latest version, I don't know.

Just, just...

They, they wouldn't know bec- And so it's not...

And equally, you take either of the technical guys and sit them down with a Toyota production system person and, and have them to explain why bull curves and what's a why bull curve and how does this work, they wouldn't know.

So every...

Go ahead.

Am I right? Is that pretty much how it happened?

It's similarly right.

It wasn't an accident.

It was a afterthought.

What, I had already cut the track.

I had, uh, I was in Unique in New York City because I was in, in New York cutting with George Benson.

I had a day off or two.

Yes

Tell me, uh, uh, on a similar note, how is the market gonna react if all of a sudden, uh, West Texas gets a good gu- gullywash sometime in the next couple of weeks, if they get something like what I'm sitting, looking out my window here in Memphis today, where it seems like the whole Mid-South is getting two inches?

We're in a weather market, and that would be, that would be one side or one extreme of a weather market.

It...

And b- I would hasten to add, Texas would need to get a good rain and then two weeks later, another good rain, [laughs] and periodic good rains.

It, the crop would have to be carried because there's no subsoil moisture in a lot of that, a lot of that ground.

But anyway, it would be a, it would be a bearish, a short-term bearish-Effect, it would probably cause some of those long speculators to liquidate their positions, uh, for fear of, uh, getting caught in, in a, in a sell-off.

Um, the flip side of that, of course, is what happens if it's the end of June and we get our last milestone acreage report is coming out and it's still dry as a bone in a lot of places of West Texas.

But, um, i- in turn, is that driving the cost of polyester higher? Um, is that making cotton more attractive at the mill? I have seen that, but I'm not sure if it's true.